Weekend Leadership Reading: 4/19/19

Weekends are time when things slow down a little. Your weekend shouldn’t be two more regular work days. That’s a sure road to burnout. Take time to refresh yourself. Take time for something different. Take time for some of that reading you can’t find time for during the week.

Here are choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms. This week there are articles about the development of artificial intelligence (AI)

“Over time, AI could become a transformative, general purpose technology like the steam engine, electricity, and the Internet. AI marketplace adoption will likely follow a typical S curve pattern, – that is, a relatively slow start in the early years, followed by a steep acceleration as the technology matures and firms learn how to best leverage AI for business value.”

“A recent study from UCLA highlights just how far there still is to go. The study illustrated a number of quite significant limitations that the researchers believe we have to understand and improve upon before we let ourselves get carried away.”

“For most people, artificial intelligence was strictly a sci-fi concept until recent years. Yet, if you go by the above timeline, the AI revolution may actually be running at least two decades late. It has been more than 70 years since the famous 1956 Dartmouth workshop with Newell, Simon, McCarthy and Minsky – the last of them passing away only three years ago (in 2016) – at which the first AI programme was officially unveiled. But statistical learning theory, the foundation of modern AI and machine learning, arrived a little ahead of the 50-year deadline. The field (whose luminaries included Vladimir Vapnik, Tommy Poggio and Steve Smale) cross-pollinated statistics, mathematics and computer science to produce a flowering of breakthroughs, leading directly to today’s AI revolution.”

“While A.I. has incredible potential to improve our lives, the truth is that it is only capable of reflecting our societal problems right back at us. And because of that, we can’t trust it to make important decisions that are susceptible to human prejudice.”